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Musings from the bitbucket

Bios bugs annoy the heck out of me

In the last few days I've been kinda-sorted prevented from successfully LiveUpgrading due to a freakin' annoying bug in my Ultra20-M2 system bios:

6636511 u20m2 bios version 1.45.1 still can't distinguish disks on the same sata channel

(It's in a closed prod/cat/subcat, sorry).

The gist of the bug is that I've got two identical Seagate 320Gb disks (ST3320620AS, 320072933376 bytes) in my system, providing /, /zroot (for my zones, it's ufs), and sink - my zpool. No matter which two SATA ports I plug those two disks into, Shidokht's/sbin/biosdev util cannot do anything but report either no disks found, or (if run with -d) that the matchcount for the devices is greater than 1.

This means that /usr/lib/lu/lumkboot, which is called as part of lucreate and friends, cannot do the needful. Hence LU fails.

Yesterday I finally cracked and went off to purchase two new 320Gb disks (one Western Digital, the other a Samsung) in order to see how deep the bug goes. This became particularly important after JanD attempted to reproduce

with an u20m2 and two identical Hitachi 250Gb disks. He wasn't able to, despite having the same model disk, with the same firmware version in each slot.

At the moment my box is having a grand old time, 1hr10 into a zpool replace:

farnarkle:jmcp $ zpool status sink
pool: sink
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will
continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
scrub: resilver in progress, 67.52% done, 0h28m to go
config:

To get to the point where zpool could replace the device, I made sure the slices on the new disk were in order, then ran zpool replace sink c3t0d0s7. That's it - it's really nifty.

I've got one more thing to try (swapping the cables around for c3t0 and c3t1), which I think I'll have a go at in about 40 minutes. Whatever the results of that test, it's not looking good for the bios when it's got Seagate-branded disks attached.